The present invention relates generally to the field of managed information technology (IT) services and more particularly to validation of consistency between contracted IT services and operational data from an end-to-end perspective.
IT environments are becoming more and more complex. New technologies, product and deployment models make the management of an IT environment difficult to maintain. To more effectively support and maintain an IT environment, many businesses and organizations have dedicated departments with specific service responsibility, or consider outsourcing. Outsourcing is an arrangement in which one company provides services for another company that could also be or usually have been provided in-house. Outsourcing is a trend that is becoming more common in information technology and other industries for services that have usually been regarded as intrinsic to managing a business.
Outsourcing operations and support of a business's or organization's IT environment involves contracting with a managed service provider instead of managing an IT environment internally. Managed services refer to the practice of outsourcing day-to-day management responsibilities as a strategic method for improving operations. The entity that owns or makes use of the systems managed is referred to as the client or customer, whereas the entity that accepts and provides the managed service is regarded as the service provider, which can be an outsourced provider or an internal IT organization. A managed services provider (MSP) is typically an IT services provider that manages and assumes responsibility for providing a defined set of services and in some cases infrastructure, to their clients.
To improve efficiency of managed service efforts and to be in compliance with the services that are to be provided by a service provider, many tools are deployed onto the servers and other devices being managed. The tools in these instances are software programs or software agents that have a specific function to perform tasks, collect data, monitor activity or check the status or state of components within an IT environment. The addition of the tools makes the environment more complex and more resource intensive to maintain. For example, to manage one server at a level defined by a contract or service level agreement, it may require up to 10 separate tools providing monitoring, security, performance, inventory, patching, backup, usage, and other functions or services.
As the complexity of the IT environment increases, service support also increases in response, and may involve added organizational structure. Service support becomes more specialized with respective service groups designated to provide respective services. Due to service providing entities becoming more segmented and specialized, there is a loss of end-to-end or “big picture” perspective of the entire support provided.
A configuration management database (CMDB) is a database that contains all relevant information about the significant components of the IT environment and the relationships between those components. A CMDB helps an organization understand the relationships between these components and track their configuration. Components of an information system can be any conceivable IT component, including software, hardware, documentation, and personnel, as well as any combination of these.
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices standards include specifications for configuration management. One of the four major tasks of configuration management identified by the ITIL standards is verification, through audits and reviews of the data to ensure that it is accurate.
IT environments can include a policy-based management approach. A Policy-Based Management policy contains a condition and a target set. The condition can include one or combinations of rules, permissions, tasks to perform, exclusion of tasks, and data collection. The target set can be a server instance, a server object, a database, or a database object that is affected by the condition or an application hosted on a server, affected by the condition. In the computing world, policy-based management is used as an administrative tool throughout a business, organization or network that has multiple users. Policy based management typically addresses conditions that include controlling access to resources within the organization or network, and priorities for the use of the resources.
Policy definitions are a response to questions such as: Who and what can access which resources? What is the highest priority traffic, what is the lowest priority traffic, and what levels of traffic are in between? A policy-based management system allows administrators to define rules based on these types of questions and manage them in the policy system. These rules take the form of “if condition, then action.”
For dynamic IT environments, managed service providers struggle to maintain consistency between the required infrastructure and services to be provided, as designated by a customer or client within a contract, and the actual deployed operations IT environment being managed.